“Prometheus!”
One second she was holding his hand, feeling the ever-present charge of his power thrumming against her skin, and the next, that energy collapsed in on itself and Prometheus crashed to the ground, the speed of his fall jerking his hand from hers.
For a long, blank moment, the sight that met her eyes refused to process. He lay on his back, one leg folded awkwardly, eyes open and staring, fixed. Dead. A scream built in the back of her throat, but she couldn’t get it out. It lodged there, choking her, suffocating her.
“He really should have taken the deal. Pity.”
Karma whirled toward the maenad, the scream trapped in her throat louder now, angry and wild and clawing its way out, but before she could make a sound Deuma put her hand on the crate—the suddenly silent crate—and vanished, along with the box that held Prometheus’s heart.
She didn’t want to look down, didn’t want to see again, but she couldn’t help herself. Her gaze went there on its own and then she couldn’t look away. Dead. Prometheus is dead. She should touch him. Check for a pulse. He doesn’t have a heart! Perform CPR. Mouth to mouth. Savage panic shredded her from the inside out with vicious claws. She was bloody with grief and she didn’t care. Do something, you idiot. There had to be something she could do.
He’d died. He’d actually died for her. While she was holding his hand. And she hadn’t seen it coming. Hadn’t even had an inkling. What good were her goddamn instincts if they couldn’t predict this? She might as well have signed away her powers to him for all the use they were. God, why hadn’t he let her? Why hadn’t she tried harder to get him to agree? It had happened so fast. One second they were negotiating and he seemed so confident it hadn’t occurred to her that anything irrevocable could happen. She’d thought he was reliably selfish, that he would never martyr himself for any cause—not even for her—and there had been a comfort in that. And then this. Death.
No. This hadn’t happened. She wouldn’t let it. It was a dream. Only a dream. She would wake up and tell him not to be an idiot. Beg him to take the deal. Beg, plead, bully, manipulate, anything to keep this from happening.
She heard someone screaming, ungodly raw sounds of agony, and realized the scream locked in her throat had escaped. She wasn’t aware of falling to the floor, but she was on her knees, shaking him. Wake up, wake up, all a bad dream. Distantly she registered the door slamming open and Rodriguez grabbing her by the shoulders, trying to pull her away, but she wouldn’t be budged. She was staying until he woke up. Cocky, laughing. I got you, didn’t I? The asshole. Just the kind of thing he would do. Die on her to prove how impossible the idea of living even a single day without him was.
He wasn’t gone. He couldn’t be gone. She threw open her power, ripping down every wall, every defense, blasting them all to pieces until she was wide open and the slam of her own power hitting her nearly made her vision go black. But she didn’t let it roll her under. She threw herself into the chaos of it willingly. In this moment she was bigger and badder than it could ever be. She shaped it, wielded it and flung it into Prometheus, willing his blood to flow, his lungs to breathe.
Nothing.
There was a vacuum where his power had been, sucking down all she poured into him and giving back no flicker of life in return. Damn it, Prometheus. You get back here, you bastard. I’m not done with you. She felt it then—not in him, but in her. Deep inside her soul some piece of him was still attached to her. She saw it with the eyes he had opened, the power he’d taught her to see, that string of power connecting them. It stretched out from her into his chest, vanishing into the wormhole that had consumed his power and left him for dead. But it was attached to something on the other end, inside that empty, incomprehensible space. He still existed. Somewhere in the planes of energy and time, he was still there. She would open a channel, blast open that wormhole and do whatever it took to haul him back through it by the string that connected them. They were fighters. They fought for what they loved. She would fight for him.
Rodriguez shouted, dragging at her shoulders, but Karma wasn’t in the physical world anymore. She unleashed the power she’d denied her whole life and crashed through the wormhole into the netherplane, chasing the nebulous thread that was her internal tether to Prometheus.
Her first impression was of a vast sense of space, but it was layered on top of itself—no laws of physics applied here. A thousand objects could occupy the same space at the same time. It was like being inside a universe on the head of a pin. Her regular senses were useless. She was blind and dumb, relying entirely on the sixth sense she’d always tried to cage. She clung to the tether, as much as she could cling without hands or eyes.
Even her sense of self was distorted, emotions blurred and dulled until the sharpness of her desperate grief and need for Prometheus was hazy and soft. Was there really any hurry? She could float here, drifting along, and things would right themselves eventually.
A burn started against her sternum—but she didn’t have a sternum, no body here—intensifying until the pain penetrated her pleasant, floaty inertia. The protection charm. Prometheus’s yin-yang. It was still around her neck, rubbing against her sternum. Warning her.
The lethargy wasn’t natural. Someone or something was slipping her a metaphysical mickey, trying to slow her down and keep her from Prometheus. She pulsed her power around her, the angry surge burning away the fog until her real emotions flared back full force. Pain. Desperation. Fear. Prometheus. She reached for that internal tether, tracking him through the layers of nothing and everything.
What she found at the other end of their link was barely identifiable as a person. It was barely a spark, more an idea of existence than an actual life, but it was him. At the most basic level, the inviolate core that had been at the center of all that wild energy. His soul. And it wasn’t free.
Someone or something had bound him there, trapped in a net of power that gleamed silver against her inner eye, and Karma had a pretty good idea who was responsible. Hang on, Prometheus. I’m gonna get you out of here. She began to tease at the moorings of the net holding his spark in place, operating on instinct and hope. This had to work. She’d free him, bring him back and he’d be fine. Alive. She hadn’t been able to resuscitate him with her power because his soul was missing, but if she brought it back, it would work. Please let this work.
The first of the slick silver moorings came loose and his spark stirred, thrashing itself against the net—that’s it, fight for me—even as the edges tried to reseal themselves. His cage had a consciousness and it wanted to stay closed. By the time she released a second and third mooring, the first had reattached. It became a race to stay ahead of them—a race she was steadily losing. Prometheus’s spark stopped shifting and twisting inside the silver net, falling dormant again.
No no no. She would get him out. She tried pouring energy through the tendril that connected them so he could fight his way out from the inside, but to no avail. She could try slicing her way through the net, but she wasn’t exactly a precision machine with her powers. What if she sliced right through and hurt him? Too risky.
If only she was inside, with him, she could burst them both out. She was sure of it.
As soon as the idea took root, she set it into motion, pouring herself down the thread connecting her to Prometheus, she slipped beneath the net and the edge of her soul brushed against his, causing latent instincts to screech out a warning. No going back from this. If you link to him fully and he stays here, you stay here. But Karma was already wrapping her amorphous self around his spark. They should have fit together like two puzzle pieces, but his piece had shrunk and she had to puff up her power to fill in his blanks. The link locked into place with an ominous finality.
Karma turned her attention to the net, slicing without mercy, and it fell away. They floated free—too easy, that devil bitch would never let it be so easy—and Karma began dragging him toward the surface of their reality, like swimming through pudding. Prometheus’s spark still lay dormant. Come on, you bastard. I know you’re in there.
Another presence erupted into the netherplane, yanking on Prometheus’s soul so hard it ripped half-free of Karma. She hissed with pain and clung. A thunderous message crashed into her consciousness on a tide of heat. “He belongs to me.”
Deuma. Only then did Karma notice the other tether attached to Prometheus. If the one linking Karma to him was a delicate silken thread, Deuma’s was a steel-core cable.
“I won’t let you take him,” Karma replied, hanging tight to her silken thread.
“Oh? Try to stop me.” Deuma jerked his spark again and Karma could only fly along with him, holding on for dear life, as the devil hauled them back to the glittering silver net. The cage was alive again, rebuilding itself, wrapping around them with liquid, tensile strength.
Karma tried to keep it from reaffixing, but it was stronger now and the more she fought, the stronger the cage seemed to get, feeding off her struggles. The futility of it seeped to her core. They’d lost. She’d come here to save him and only wound up damning herself.
“No.” It was so soft she almost didn’t hear it, a whisper, not even words really, but a faint scratch at the back of her mind, so deep it couldn’t possibly be real. Then she heard it again. “No. My Karma doesn’t give up. She’s invincible, if she would let herself be. She can Hulk-smash the hell out of that puny demon bitch one handed.”
“Prometheus?”
But there was no reply. Only Deuma’s taunt as the last of the net’s moorings slid into place. “Two-for-one special. I hadn’t pegged you for such a fool.”
Had she imagined him? Hulk-smash the hell… Was there really still a part of him alive enough to believe in her? Invincible, if she would let herself… Karma stopped struggling, falling down into herself to that deep, dark place, the wellspring of her powers that had always scared the everloving shit out of her. She’d pulled down her walls, but she’d left this dam in place, too terrified to contemplate letting the power truly have free rein. But fear had no place here. Prometheus believed in her—even if it was a hallucination of him. It was time she started believing in herself. She looked with her inner eye to the angry red energy of Deuma. “You can’t have him. This soul is mine.”
The dam exploded.
She was power. She was light. She was particles and chain reactions. The net evaporated. No bounds could contain her. She launched herself upward, cradling Prometheus’s spark protectively, but the steel-core cable was still there, dragging him back. Oh no you don’t. She reached through the two tethers, through Prometheus and down the cable until she felt Deuma’s power, the wild, foreign pulse of it, slippery and dark. It was insidious and corrupting, but she didn’t fear power. She was power. Deuma shrieked and thrashed, but Karma dug her hooks in deep and she pulled. All that power, stolen from thousands of vulnerable souls over a millennia of double-edged contracts, it poured along the cable, into Prometheus’s spark. That sliver of him swelled, gorging on the feast of energy, growing until it was the perfect puzzle piece again, then continuing to grow, feeding. The devil tried to cut the cable, struggling to be free, but Karma wasn’t feeling merciful. She left the she-devil with as much energy as the bitch had left Prometheus. Just a spark. And she buried that spark beneath layers of silver nets, blankets of them. Then she, Karma, snapped the cable with a final promise. “You will never touch him again.”
There was no response. There wasn’t enough of Deuma left to respond. Karma didn’t care. She was power—and so was her lover. With the wellspring free and the riot of energy flowing through her, returning them to their bodies was the work of a thought.
Karma gasped in a breath, feeling like she’d been underwater a hundred years. Sprawled on the floor beside her, she heard Prometheus do the same. He’s alive.
“Madre de Dios, ellos viven. They’re alive. They woke up. I’ll call you back.” Rodriguez came into her field of vision, swearing in Spanish. “You were dead,” he said when he was capable of English again. “First him, then you. You stopped breathing. You fell over dead. What the fuck?” His accent thickened the words and then he fell into Spanish again.
Her body felt thick and slow after the faster-than-thought lightness of the netherplane and she was so exhausted she could barely form a thought. Then a hand brushed hers, long fingers seeking, and a swell of relief broke over her. Prometheus. Karma turned her head to find those black hole eyes looking back at her—but they weren’t pure black anymore. It was small, and if she’d been farther than a few inches away she might not have seen it, but now there was another aspect to the darkness of his gaze. A star. A small, white, spark of a star.
He blurred as tears flooded her eyes. He looked pretty damn amazing for a dead man. “Hi,” she whispered.
His brow furrowed. “What happened? Are you all right?”
Karma swallowed thickly and smiled. “I’m amazing. You’re alive.”
“You were dead,” Rodriguez snapped, reminding them that they weren’t alone. “You both were.”
Prometheus sat up, groaning, and the two men helped Karma do the same. “How long?” she asked her exorcist.
“A minute, maybe two. I couldn’t remember the CPR so I called Brittany. Longest goddamn minute of my life.”
Karma smiled wryly. “Mine too.”
Prometheus put an arm around her shoulders and she sagged against him.
Rodriguez’s next words were cautious. “Ah, Karma? Did you know you guys are glowing?”
She looked down at her hands. So they were. She could feel her magic shining through her veins. She’d have to learn how to rein that in or she’d freak people out in the supermarket. Prometheus could probably teach her. He was already dialing down his own glow, now that Rodriguez had mentioned it. She felt the wild, extravagant tangle of his power pulling in and dialing down until it was just a lingering hum beneath his skin. She still had a lot to learn about being a demigod—if that was what they were now.
But all that could wait for later. She laid her head on Prometheus’s chest and closed her eyes, hearing the slow steady beat of a heart. Strong and constant. Mine.